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THE DESTINY OF MAN 

VIEWED IN THE LIGHT 

OF HIS ORIGIN 



By JOHN FISKE 



NINETEENTH EDITION. 



BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 

Sfce fci&tMto* i?ress, (Eambrtoge 

1893 



^ 



4>\\ 






Copyright, 1884, 
By JOHN FISKE. 

All rights reserved. 



Gift 
PMap Wilkav 



7%* Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S, A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 



To 

MY CHILDREN, 

MAUD, HAROLD, CLARENCE, RALPH, 
ETHEL, and HERBERT, 

IS LOVINGLY BE DIC A TED. 



*$ 



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PREFACE. 




RAVING been invited to give an ad* 
dress before the Concord School 
of Philosophy this summer, upon 
some subject relating to the question 
of immortality there under discussion, it 
seemed a proper occasion for putting to- 
gether the following thoughts on the ori- 
gin of Man and his place in the universe. 
In dealing with the unknown, it is well 
to take one's start a long way within the 
limits of the known. The question of a 
future life is generally regarded as lying 
outside the range of legitimate scientific 
discussion. Yet while fully admitting this, 
one does not necessarily admit that the 
subject is one with regard to which we 
are forever debarred from entertaining an 
opinion. Now our opinions on such tran 



vi Preface. 

scendental questions must necessarily be 
affected by the total mass of our opinions 
on the questions which lie within the 
scope of scientific inquiry ; and from this 
point of view it becomes of surpassing in- 
terest to trace the career of Humanity 
within that segment of the universe which 
is accessible to us. The teachings of the 
doctrine of evolution as to the origin and 
destiny of Man have, moreover, a very 
great speculative and practical value of 
their own, quite apart from their bearings 
upon any ultimate questions. The body 
of this essay is accordingly devoted to 
setting forth these teachings in what I 
conceive to be their true light ; while their 
transcendental implications are reserved 
for the sequel. 

As the essay contains an epitome of my 
own original contributions to the doctrine 
of evolution, I have added at the end a 
short list of references to other works of 
mine, where the points here briefly men- 
tioned are more fully argued and illus- 



Preface. viz 

trated. The views regarding the progress 
of human society, and the elimination of 
warfare, are set forth at greater length in 
a little book now in the press, and soon 
to appear, entitled " American Political 
Ideas." 

Petersham, September 6, 1884. 




CONTENTS. 



I. Man's Place in Nature as affected by the 

Copernican Theory . . . . // 
II. As affected by Darwinism . . . 18 

III. On the Earth there will never be a Higher 

Creature than Man . . . . 26 

IV. The Origin of Infancy 35 
V. The Dawning of Consciousness . . 42 

VI. Lengthening of Infancy and Concomitant 

Increase of Brain-Surface . . • 5* 
VII. Change in the Direction of the Working 

of Natural Selection . . . . $g 
VIII. Growing Predominance of the Psychical 

Life 62 

IX. The Origins of Society and of Morality . 66 
X. Improvableness of Man . . . 7/ 
XI. Universal Warfare of Primeval Men . yy 
XII. First checked by the Beginnings of Indus- 
trial Civilisation 81 

XIII. Methods of Political Development, and 

Elimination of Warfare . . . 83 



x Contents. 

XIV. End of the IV or king of Natural Selection 
upon Man. Throwing off the Brute- 
Inheritance 96 

XV. The Message of Christianity . . .104 

XVI. The Question as to a Future Life . . 108 







THE DESTINY OF MAN. 



Man's Place in Nature, as affected by the 
Copernican Theory. 

HEN we study the Divine Comedy 
of Dante — that wonderful book 
wherein all the knowledge and 
speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, 
of the far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in 
the glory of imperishable verse — we are 
brought face to face with a theory of the 
world and with ways of reasoning about 
the facts of nature which seem strange to 
us to-day, but from the influence of which 
we are not yet, and doubtless never shall 
be, wholly freed. A cosmology grotesque 
-enough in the light of later knowledge, yet 
wrought out no less carefully than the 



12 The Destiny of Man. 

physical theories of Lucretius, is employed 
in the service of a theology cumbrous in 
its obsolete details, but resting upon funda- 
mental truths which mankind can never 
safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante 
and of that phase of human culture which 
found in him its clearest and sweetest 
voice, this earth, the fair home of man, 
was placed in the centre of a universe 
wherein all things were ordained for his 
sole behoof : the sun to give him light and 
warmth, the stars in their courses to pre- 
side over his strangely checkered destinies, 
the winds to blow, the floods to rise, or the 
fiend of pestilence to stalk abroad over the 
land, — all for the blessing, or the warning, 
or the chiding, of the chief among God's 
creatures, Man. Upon some such concep- 
tion as this, indeed, all theology would 
seem naturally to rest. Once dethrone 
Humanity, regard it as a mere local in- 
cident in an endless and aimless series 
of cosmical changes, and you arrive at a 
doctrine which, under whatever specious 



I 



The Destiny of Man. 13 

name it may be veiled, is at bottom neither 
more nor less than Atheism. On its met- 
aphysical side Atheism is the denial of 
anything psychical in the universe outside 
of human consciousness ; and it is almost 
inseparably associated with the materialis- 
tic interpretation of human consciousness 
as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collo- 
cation of particles of matter. Viewed upon 
this side, it is easy to show that Atheism 
is very bad metaphysics, while the materi- 
alism which goes with it is utterly con- 
demned by modern science. 1 But our feel- 
ing toward Atheism goes much deeper 
than the mere recognition of it as philo- 
sophically untrue. The mood in which we 
condemn it is not at all like the mood in 
which we reject the corpuscular theory of 
light or Sir G. C Lewis's vagaries on the 
subject of Egyptian hieroglyphics. We 
are wont to look upon Atheism with un- 
speakable horror and loathing. Our moral 
sense revolts against it no less than our 
intelligence ; and this is because, on its 



14 The Destiny of Man. 

practical side, Atheism would remove Hu- 
manity from its peculiar position in the 
world, and make it cast in its lot with the 
grass that withers and the beasts that per- 
ish ; and thus the rich and varied life of 
the universe, in all the ages of its won- 
drous duration, becomes deprived of any 
such element of purpose as can make it in- 
telligible to us or appeal to our moral sym- 
pathies and religious aspirations. 

And yet the first result of some of the 
grandest and most irrefragable truths of 
modern science, when newly discovered 
and dimly comprehended, has been to 
make it appear that Humanity must be 
rudely unseated from its throne in the 
world and made to occupy an utterly sub- 
ordinate and trivial position ; and it is 
because of this mistaken view of their im- 
port that the Church has so often and so 
bitterly opposed the teaching of such 
truths. With the advent of the Coper- 
nican astronomy the funnel-shaped Inferno, 
the steep mountain of Purgatory crowned 



The Destiny of Man. 15 

with its terrestrial paradise, and those con- 
centric spheres of Heaven wherein beati- 
fied saints held weird and subtle converse, 
all went their way to the limbo prepared 
for the childlike fancies of untaught minds, 
whither Hades and Valhalla had gone be- 
fore them. In our day it is hard to realize 
the startling effect of the discovery that 
Man does not dwell at the centre of things, 
but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny 
speck of cosmical matter quite invisible 
amid the innumerable throng of flaming 
suns that make up our galaxy. To the 
contemporaries of Copernicus the new the- 
ory seemed to strike at the very founda- 
tions of Christian theology. In a universe 
where so much had been made without dis- 
cernible reference to Man, what became of 
that elaborate scheme of salvation which 
seemed to rest upon the assumption that 
the career of Humanity was the sole ob- 
ject of God's creative forethought and fos- 
tering care ? When we bear this in mind, 
we see how natural and inevitable it was 



1 6 The Destiny of Man. 

that the Church should persecute such 
men as Galileo and Bruno. At the same 
time it is instructive to observe that, while 
the Copernican astronomy has become 
firmly established in spite of priestly op- 
position, the foundations of Christian the- 
ology have not been shaken thereby. It 
is not that the question which once so 
sorely puzzled men has ever been settled, 
but that it has been outgrown. The spec- 
ulative necessity for jnan's occupying the 
largest and most central spot in the uni- 
verse is no longer felt. It is recognized as 
a primitive and childish notion. With our 
larger knowledge we see that these vast 
and fiery suns are after all but the Titan 
like servants of the little planets which 
they bear with them in their flight through 
the abysses of space. Out from the awful 
gaseous turmoil of the central mass dart 
those ceaseless waves of gentle radiance 
that, when caught upon the surface of 
whirling worlds like ours, bring forth the 
endlessly varied forms and the endlessly 



The Destiny of Man. ij 

complex movements that make up what 
we can* see of life. And as when God re- 
vealed himself to his ancient prophet He 
came not in the earthquake or the tem- 
pest but in a voice that was still and small, 
so that divine spark the Soul, as it takes 
up its brief abode in this realm of fleeting 
phenomena, chooses not the central sun 
where elemental forces forever blaze and 
clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial 
nook where seeds may germinate in si- 
lence, and where through slow fruition the 
mysterious forms of organic life may come 
to take shape and thrive. He who thus 
looks a little deeper into the secrets of na- 
ture than his forefathers of the sixteenth 
century may well smile at the quaint con- 
ceit that man cannot be the object of God's 
care unless he occupies an immovable posi- 
tion in the centre of the stellar universe. 



II. 



Man's Place in Nature, as affected by 
Darwinism. 



HEN the Copernican astronomy 
was finally established through the 
discoveries of Kepler and Newton, 
it might well have been pronounced the 
greatest scientific achievement of the hu- 
man mind ; but it was still more than that. 
It was the greatest revolution that had 
ever been effected in Man's views of his 
relations to the universe in which he lives, 
and of which he is — at least during the 
present life — a part. During the nine- 
teenth century, however, a still greater 
revolution has been effected. Not only 
has Lyell enlarged our mental horizon in 
time as much as Newton enlarged it in 
space, but it appears that throughout these 
vast stretches of time and space with which 



The Destiny of Man. 19 

we have been made acquainted there are 
sundry well-marked changes going on, 
Certain definite paths of development are 
being pursued ; and around us on every 
side we behold worlds, organisms, and 
societies in divers stages of progress or 
decline. Still more, as we examine the 
records of past life upon our globe, and 
study the mutual relations of the liv- 
ing things that still remain, it appears 
that the higher forms of life — including 
Man himself — are the modified descend- 
ants of lower forms. Zoologically speak- 
ing, Man can no longer be regarded as a 
creature apart by himself. We cannot 
erect an order on purpose to contain him, 
as Cuvier tried to do ; w r e cannot even 
make a separate family for him. Man is 
not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a 
primate, but he belongs, as a genus, to the 
catarrhine family of apes. And just as 
lions, leopards, and lynxes — different gen- 
era of the cat-family — are descended from 
a common stock of carnivora, back to 



20 The Destiny of Man. 

which we may also trace the pedigrees of 
dogs, hyaenas, bears, and seals ; so the va- 
rious genera of platyrrhine and catarrhine 
apes, including Man, are doubtless de- 
scended from a common stock of primates, 
back to which we may also trace the con- 
verging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, 
until their ancestry becomes indistinguish- 
able from that of rabbits and squirrels. 
Such is the conclusion to which the scien- 
tific world has come within a quarter of a 
century from the publication of Mr. Dar- 
win's " Origin of Species ; " and there is 
no more reason for supposing that this 
conclusion will ever be gainsaid than for 
supposing that the Copernican astronomy 
will some time be overthrown and the 
concentric spheres of Dante's heaven re- 
instated in the minds of men. 

It is not strange that this theory of 
man's origin, which we associate mainly 
with the name of Mr. Darwin, should be 
to many people very unwelcome. It is 
fast bringing about a still greater revolu* 



The Destiny of Man. 2) 

tion in thought than that which was her* 
aided by Copernicus ; and it naturally takes 
some time for the various portions of one's 
theory of things to become adjusted, one 
after another, to so vast and sweeping a 
change. From many quarters the cry goes 
up, — If this be true, then Man is at length 
cast down from his high position in the 
world. " I will not be called a mammal, 
or the son of a mammal! " once exclaimed 
an acquaintance of mine who perhaps had 
been brought up by hand. Such expres- 
sions of feeling are crude, but the feeling is 
not unjustifiable. It is urged that if man 
is physically akin to a baboon, as pigs are 
akin to horses, and cows to deer, then Hu- 
manity can in nowise be regarded as occu- 
pying a peculiar place in the universe ; it 
becomes a mere incident in an endless se- 
ries of changes, and how can we say that 
the same process of evolution that has pro- 
duced mankind may not by and by produce 
something far more perfect ? There was a 
time when huge bird-like reptiles were the 



22 The Destiny of Man. 

lords of creation, and after these had been 
" sealed within the iron hills " there came 
successive dynasties of mammals ; and as 
the iguanodon gave place to the great Eo- 
cene marsupials, as the mastodon and the 
sabre-toothed lion have long since van- 
ished from the scene, so may not Man by 
and by disappear to make way for some 
higher creature, and so on forever ? In 
such case, why should we regard Man as 
in any higher sense the object of Divine 
care than a pig ? Still stronger does the 
case appear when we remember that those 
countless adaptations of means to ends in 
nature, which since the time of Voltaire 
and Paley we have been accustomed to 
cite as evidences of creative design, have 
received at the hands of Mr. Darwin a 
very different interpretation. The lob- 
ster's powerful claw, the butterfly's gor- 
geous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, 
the architectural instinct of the bee, the 
astonishing structure of the orchid, are no 
longer explained as the results of contri- 



The Destiny of Man, 23 

vance. That simple but wasteful process 
of survival of the fittest, through which 
such marvellous things have come into be- 
ing, has little about it that is analogous to 
the ingenuity of human art. The infinite 
and eternal Power which is thus revealed 
in the physical life of the universe seems 
in nowise akin to the human soul. The 
idea of beneficent purpose seems for the 
moment to be excluded from nature, and a 
blind process, known as Natural Selection, 
is the deity that slumbers not nor sleeps. 
Reckless of good and evil, it brings forth 
at once the mother's tender love for her 
infant and the horrible teeth of the raven- 
ing shark, and to its creative indifference 
the one is as good as the other. 

In spite of these appalling arguments the 
man of science, urged by the single-hearted 
purpose to ascertain the truth, be the con- 
sequences what .they may, goes quietly on 
and finds that the terrible theory must be 
adopted; the fact of man's consanguinity 
with dumb beasts must be admitted. In 



24 The Destiny of Man. 

reaching this conclusion, the man of sci- 
ence reasons upon the physical facts within 
his reach, applying to them the same prin- 
ciples of common-sense whereby our every- 
day lives are successfully guided ; and he is 
very apt to smile at the methods of those 
people who, taking hold of the question at 
the wrong end, begin by arguing about all 
manner of fancied consequences. For his 
knowledge of the history of human think- 
ing assures him that such methods have 
through all past time proved barren of 
aught save strife, while his own bold yet 
humble method is the only one through 
which truth has ever been elicited. To 
pursue unflinchingly the methods of sci- 
ence requires dauntless courage and a faith 
that nothing can shake. Such courage 
and such loyalty to nature brings its own 
reward. For when once the formidable 
theory is really understood, when once its 
implications are properly unfolded, it is 
seen to have no such logical consequences 
as were at first ascribed to it. As with 



The Destiny of Man. 25 

the Copernican astronomy, so with the 
Darwinian biology, we rise to a higher 
view of the workings of God and of the 
nature of Man than was ever attainable 
before. So far from degrading Humanity, 
or putting it on a level with the animal 
world in general, the Darwinian theory 
shows us distinctly for the first time how 
the creation and the perfecting of Man is 
the goal toward which Nature's work has 
all the while been tending. It enlarges 
tenfold the significance of human life, 
places it upon even a loftier eminence 
than poets or prophets have imagined, and 
makes it seem more than ever the chief 
object of that creative activity which is 
manifested in the physical universe. 




III. 




On the Earth there will never be a Higher 
Creature than Man. 

]N elucidating these points, we may 
fitly begin by considering the 
question as to the possibilitv cf the 
evolution of any higher creature than Man, 
to whom the dominion over this earth shall 
pass. The question will best be answered 
by turning back and observing one of the 
most remarkable features connected with 
the origin of Man and with his superiority 
over other animals. And let it be borne in 
mind that we are not now about to wander 
through the regions of unconditional possi- 
bility. We are not dealing with vague 
general notions of development, but with 
the scientific Darwinian theory, which al- 
leges development only as the result of 
certain rigorously defined agencies. The 



The Destiny of Man. 27 

chief among these agencies is Natural Se- 
lection. It has again and again been illus- 
trated how by the cumulative selection and 
inheritance of slight physical variations 
generic differences, like those between the 
tiger and the leopard, or the cow and the 
antelope, at length arise; and the guid- 
ing principle in the accumulation of slight 
physical differences has been the welfare 
of the species. The variant forms on either 
side have survived while the constant forms 
have perished, so that the lines of demar- 
cation between allied species have grown 
more and more distinct, and it is usually 
only by going back to fossil ages that we 
can supply the missing links of continuity. 
In the desperate struggle for existence no 
peculiarity, physical or psychical, however 
slight, has been too insignificant for nat- 
ural selection to seize and enhance; and 
the myriad fantastic forms and hues of an- 
imal and vegetal life illustrate the seeming 
capriciousness of its workings. Psychical 
variations have never been unimportant 



28 The Destiny of Man. 

since the appearance of the first faint pig- 
ment-spot which by and by was to translate 
touch into vision, as it developed into the 
lenses and humours of the eye. 2 Special 
organs of sense and the lower grades of 
perception and judgment were slowly de- 
veloped through countless ages, in com- 
pany with purely physical variations of 
shape of foot, or length of neck, or com- 
plexity of stomach, or thickness of hide. 
At length there came a wonderful moment 
■ — silent and unnoticed, as are the begin- 
nings of all great revolutions. Silent and 
unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord 
which cometh like a thief in the night, 
there arrived that wonderful moment at 
which psychical changes began to be of 
more use than physical changes to the 
brute ancestor of Man. Through further 
ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable 
variations in this creature occurred oftener 
and oftener in the brain, arid less often in 
other parts of the organism, until by and 
by the size of his brain had been doubled 



The Destiny of Man. 29 

and its complexity of structure increased 
a thousand-fold, while in other respects his 
appearance was not so very different from 
that of his brother apes. 3 Along with this 
growth of the brain, the complete assump- 
tion of the upright posture, enabling the 
hands to be devoted entirely to prehension 
and thus relieving the jaws of that part of 
their work, has cooperated in producing 
that peculiar contour of head and face 
which is the chief distinguishing mark of 
physical Man. These slight anatomical 
changes derive their importance entirely 
from the prodigious intellectual changes 
in connection with which they have been 
produced ; and these intellectual changes 
have been accumulated until the distance, 
psychically speaking, between civilized man 
and the ape is so great as to dwarf in com- 
parison all that had been achieved in the 
process of evolution down to the time of 
our half-human ancestor's first appearance. 
No fact in nature is fraught with deeper 
meaning than this two-sided fact of the 



jo The Destiny of Man. 

extreme physical similarity and enormous 
psychical divergence between Man and the 
group of animals to which he traces his 
pedigree,, It shows that when Human- 
ity began to be evolved an entirely new 
chapter in the history of the universe was 
opened. Henceforth the life of the nas- 
cent soul came to be first in importance, 
and the bodily life became subordinated to 
it. Henceforth it appeared that, in this 
direction at least, the process of zoological 
change had come to an end, and a process 
of psychological change was to take its 
place. Henceforth along this supreme line 
of generation there was to be no further 
evolution of new species through physical 
variation, but through the accumulation of 
psychical variations one particular species 
was to be indefinitely perfected and raised 
to a totally different plane from that on 
which all life had hitherto existed. Hence- 
forth, in short, the dominant aspect of ev- 
olution was to be not the genesis of spe* 
cies, but the progress of Civilization. 



The Destiny of Man. 31 

As we thoroughly grasp the meaning of 
all this, we see that upon the Darwinian 
theory it is impossible that any creature 
zoologically distinct from Man and supe- 
rior to him should ever at any future time 
exist upon the earth. In the regions of 
unconditional possibility it is open to any 
one to argue, if he chooses, that such a 
creature may come to exist ; but the Dar- 
winian theory is utterly opposed to any 
such conclusion. According to Darwinism, 
the creation of Man is still the goal toward 
which Nature tended from the beginning. 
Not the production of any higher creature, 
but the perfecting of Humanity, is to be 
the glorious consummation of Nature's 
long and tedious work. Thus we sud- 
denly arrive at the conclusion that Man 
seems now, much more clearly than ever, 
the chief among God's creatures. On the 
primitive barbaric theory, which Mr. Dar- 
win has swept away, Man was suddenly 
flung into the world by the miraculous act 
of some unseen and incalculable Power act- 



?2 The Destiny of Man. 

ing from without ; and whatever theology 
might suppose, no scientific reason could 
be alleged why the same incalculable 
Power might not at some future moment, 
by a similar miracle, thrust upon the scene 
some mightier creature in whose presence 
Man would become like a sorry beast of 
burden. But he who has mastered the 
Darwinian theory, he who recognizes the 
slow and subtle process of evolution as the 
way in which God makes things come to 
pass, must take a far higher view. He sees 
that in the deadly struggle for existence 
which has raged throughout countless 
aeons of time, the whole creation has been 
groaning and travailing together in order 
to bring forth that last consummate speci- 
men of God's handiwork, the Human Soul. 
To the creature thus produced through 
a change in the direction in which natural 
selection has worked, the earth and most 
of its living things have become gradually 
subordinated. In all the classes of the 
animal and vegetal worlds many ancient 



The Destiny of Man. 33 

species have become extinct, and many 
modern species have come into being, 
through the unchecked working of natural 
selection, since Man became distinctively 
human. But in this respect a change has 
long been coming over the face of nature. 
The destinies of all other living things are 
more and more dependent upon the will of 
Man. It rests with him to determine, to a 
great degree, what plants and animals shall 
remain upon the earth and what shall be 
swept from its surface. By unconsciously 3? 
imitating the selective processes of Na- 
ture, he long ago wrought many wild spe= 
cies into forms subservient to his needs. 
He has created new varieties of fruit and 
flower and cereal grass, and has reared 
new breeds of animals to aid him in the 
work of civilization ; until at length he is 
beginning to acquire a mastery over me- 
chanical and molecular and chemical forces 
which is doubtless destined in the future 
to achieve marvellous results whereof to- 
day we little dream. Natural selection 
3 



$4 The Destiny of Man. 

itself will by and by occupy a subordinate 
place in comparison with selection by 
Man, whose appearance on the earth is 
thus seen more clearly than ever to have 
opened an entirely new chapter in the mys- 
terious history of creation. 




IV. 




The Origin of Infancy. 

UT before we can fully understand 
the exalted position which the 
Darwinian theory assigns to man, 
another point demands consideration. The 
natural selection of psychical peculiarities 
does not alone account for the origin of 
Man, or explain his most signal difference 
from all other animals. That difference is 
unquestionably a difference in kind, but in 
saying this one must guard against mis- 
understanding. Not only in the world of 
organic life, but throughout the known 
universe, the doctrine of evolution regards 
differences in kind as due to the gradual 
accumulation of differences in degree. To 
cite a very simple case, what differences of 
kind can be more striking than the differ- 
ences between a nebula, a sun, a planet 



$6 The Destiny of Man. 

like the earth, and a planet like our moon ? 
Yet these things are simply examples of 
cosmical matter at four different stages of 
cooling. The physical differences between 
steam, water, and ice afford a more famil- 
iar example. In the organic world the per- 
petual modification of structures that has 
been effected through natural selection ex- 
hibits countless instances of differences in 
kind which have risen from the accumu- 
lation of differences in degree. No one 
would hesitate to call a horse's hoof differ- 
ent in kind from a cat's paw ; yet a hoof 
is made up of five claws grown together 
and furnished with a nail in common. The 
most signal differences in kind are wont to 
arise when organs originally developed for 
a certain purpose come to be applied to a 
very different purpose, as that change of 
the fish's air-bladder into a lung which ac- 
companied the first development of land 
vertebrates. But still greater becomes the 
revolution when a certain process goes on 
until it sets going a number of other proc- 



The Destiny of Man. jj 

esses, unlocking series after series of cau- 
sal agencies until a vast and complicated 
result is reached, such as could by no pos- 
sibility have been foreseen. The creation 
of Man was one of these vast and compli- 
cated results due to the unlocking of vari- 
ous series of causal agencies ; and it was 
the beginning of a deeper and mightier 
difference in kind than any that slowly- 
evolving Nature had yet witnessed. 

I have indicated, as the moment at 
which the creation of mankind began, the 
moment when psychical variations became 
of so much more use to our ancestors 
than physical variations that they were 
seized and enhanced by natural selection, 
to the comparative neglect of the latter. 
Increase of intellectual capacity, in connec- 
tion with the developing brain of a single 
race of creatures, now became the chief 
work of natural selection in originating 
Man ; and this, I say, was the opening of 
a new chapter, the last and most wonder- 
ful chapter., in the history of creation. But 



38 The Destiny of Man. 

the increasing intelligence and enlarged 
experience of half-human man now set in 
motion a new series of changes which 
greatly complicated the matter. In order 
to understand these changes, we must 
consider for a moment one very important 
characteristic of developing intelligence. 
/ The simplest actions in which the ner- 
vous system is concerned are what we call 
reflex actions. All the visceral actions 
which keep us alive from moment to 
moment, the movements of the heart and 
lungs, the contractions of arteries, the 
secretions of glands, the digestive opera- 
tions of the stomach and liver, belong to 
the class of reflex actions. Throughout 
the animal world these acts are repeated, 
with little or no variation, from birth un- 
til death, and the tendency to perform 
them is completely organized in the ner- 
vous system before birth. Every animal 
breathes and digests as well at the begin- 
ning of his life as he ever does. Contact 
with air and food is all that is needed, and 



The Destiny of Man. 39 

there is nothing to be learned. These ac- 
tions, though they are performed by the 
nervous system, we do not class as psychi- 
cal, because they are nearly or quite un- 
attended by consciousness. The psychical 
life of the lowest animals consists of a few 
simple acts directed toward the securing 
of food and the avoidance of danger, and 
these acts we are in the habit of classing 
as instinctive. They are so simple, so 
few, and so often repeated, that the ten- 
dency to perform them is completely or- 
ganized in the nervous system before 
birth. The animal takes care of himself 
as soon as he begins to live. He has 
nothing to learn, and his career is a sim- 
ple repetition of the careers of countless 
ancestors. With him heredity is every- 
thing, and his individual experience is 
next to nothing. 

As we ascend the animal scale till we 
come to the higher birds and mammals, 
we find a very interesting and remarkable 
change beginning. The general increase 



40 The Destiny of Man. 

of intelligence involves an increasing vari- 
ety and complication of experiences. The 
acts which the animal performs in the 
coarse of its life become far more numer- 
ous, far more various, and far more com- 
plex. They are therefore severally re- 
peated with less frequency in the lifetime 
of each individual. Consequently the ten- 
dency to perform them is not completely 
organized in the nervous system of the 
offspring before birth. The short period 
of ante-natal existence does not afford 
time enough for the organization of so 
many and such complex habitudes and 
capacities. The process which in the 
lower animals is completed before birth is 
in the higher animals left to be completed 
after birtli. When the creature begins its 
life it is not completely organized. In- 
stead of the power of doing all the things 
which its parents did, it starts with the 
power of doing only some few of them ; 
for the rest it has only latent capacities 
which need to be brought out by its in- 



The Destiny of Man. 41 

dividual experience after birth. In other 
words, it begins its separate life not as a 
matured creature, but as an infant which 
needs for a time to be watched and 
helped. 




V. 




The Dawning of Consciousness. 

ERE we arrive at one of the most 
wonderful moments in the history 
of creation, — the moment of the 
first faint dawning of consciousness, the 
foreshadowing of the true life of the soul. 
Whence came the soul we no more know 
than we know whence came the universe. 
The primal origin of consciousness is hid- 
den in the depths of the bygone eternity. 
That it cannot possibly be the product of 
any cunning arrangement of material par- 
ticles is demonstrated beyond peradventure 
by what we now know of the correlation of 
physical forces. 4 The Platonic view of the 
soul, as a spiritual substance, an effluence 
from Godhood, which under certain con- 
ditions becomes incarnated in perishable 
forms of matter, is doubtless the view 



The Destiny of Man. 43 

most consonant with the present state of 
our knowledge. Yet while we know not 
the primal origin of the soul, we have 
learned something with regard to the con- 
ditions under which it has become incar- 
nated in material forms. Modern psychol- 
ogy has something to say about the dawn- 
ing of conscious life in the animal world. 
Reflex action is unaccompanied by con- 
sciousness. The nervous actions which 
regulate the movements of the viscera go 
on without our knowledge ; we learn of 
their existence only by study, as we learn 
of facts in outward nature. If you tickle 
the foot of a person asleep, and the foot 
is withdrawn by simple reflex action, the 
sleeper is unconscious alike of the irrita- 
tion and of the movement, even as the 
decapitated frog is unconscious when a 
drop of nitric acid falls on his back and he 
lifts up a leg and rubs the place. In like 
manner the reflex movements which make 
up the life of the lowest animals are doubt- 
less quite unconscious, even when in their 



44 The Destiny of Man. 

general character they simulate conscious 
actions, as they often do. In the case of 
such creatures, the famous hypothesis of 
Descartes, that animals are automata, is 
doubtless mainly correct. In the case of 
instincts also, where the instinctive ac- 
tions are completely organized before birth, 
and are repeated without variation during 
the whole lifetime of the individual, there 
is probably little if any consciousness. It 
is an essential prerequisite of conscious- 
ness that there should be a period of delay 
or tension between the receipt of an im- 
pression and the determination of the con- 
sequent movement. Diminish this period 
of delay and you diminish the vividness of 
consciousness. A familiar example will 
make this clear. When you are learning 
to play a new piece of music on the piano, 
especially if you do not read music rapidly, 
you are intensely conscious of each group 
of notes on the page, and of each group of 
keys that you strike, and of the relations 
of the one to the other. But when you 



The Destiny of Man. 45 

have learned the piece by heart, you think 
nothing of either notes or keys, but play 
automatically while your attention is con- 
centrated upon the artistic character of the 
music. If somebody thoughtlessly inter- 
rupts you with a question about Egyptian 
politics, you go on playing while you an= 
swer him politely. That is, where you had 
at first to make a conscious act of volition 
for each movement, the whole group of 
movements has now become automatic, and 
volition is only concerned in setting the 
process going. As the delay involved in 
the perception and the movement disap- 
pears, so does the consciousness of the 
perception and the movement tend to dis. 
appear. Consciousness implies perpetual 
discrimination, or the recognition of like- 
nesses and differences, and this is impossi- 
ble unless impressions persist long enough 
to be compared with one another. The 
physical organs in connection with whose 
activity consciousness is manifested are the 
upper and outer parts of the brain, — the 



46 The Destiny of Man. 

cerebrum and cerebellum. These organs 
never receive impressions directly from 
the outside world, but only from lower 
nerve-centres, such as the spinal cord, the 
medulla, the optic lobes, and other special 
centres of sensation. The impressions re- 
ceived by the cerebrum and cerebellum 
are waves of molecular disturbance sent 
up along centripetal nerves from the lower 
centres, and presently drafted off along 
centrifugal nerves back to the lower cen- 
tres, thus causing the myriad movements 
which make up our active life. Now there 
is no consciousness except when molecu- 
lar disturbance is generated in the cere- 
brum and cerebellum faster than it can be 
drafted off to the lower centres. 5 It is the 
surplus of molecular disturbance remain- 
ing in the cerebrum and cerebellum, and 
reflected back and forth among the cells 
and fibres of which these highest centres 
are composed, that affords the physical 
condition for the manifestation of con- 
sciousness. Memory, emotion, reason, and 



The Destiny of Man. 47 

volition begin with this retention of a sur- 
plus of molecular motion in the high- 
est centres. As we survey the vertebrate 
sub -kingdom of animals, we find that as 
this surplus increases, the surface of the 
highest centres increases in area. In the 
lowest vertebrate animal, the amphioxus, 
the cerebrum and cerebellum do not exist 
at all. In fishes we begin to find them, 
but they are much smaller than the optic 
lobes. In such a highly organized fish as 
the halibut, which weighs about as much 
as an average-sized man, the cerebrum is 
smaller than a melon -seed. Continuing 
to grow by adding concentric layers at 
the surface, the cerebrum and cerebellum 
become much larger in birds and lower 
mammals, gradually covering up the optic 
lobes. As we pass to higher mammalian 
forms, the growth of the cerebrum be- 
comes most conspicuous, until it extends 
backwards so far as to cover up the cere- 
bellum, whose functions are limited to the 
conscious adjustment of muscular move- 



48 The Destiny of Man. 

ments. In the higher apes the cerebrum 
begins to extend itself forwards, and this 
goes on in the human race. The cranial 
capacity of the European exceeds that of 
the Australian by forty cubic inches, or 
nearly four times as much as that by 
which the Australian exceeds the gorilla ; 
and the expansion is almost entirely in the 
upper and anterior portions. But the in- 
crease of the cerebral surface is shown not 
only in the general size of the organ, but 
to a still greater extent in the irregular 
creasing and furrowing of the surface. 
This creasing and furrowing begins to 
occur in the higher mammals, and in civ- 
ilized man it is carried to an astonishing 
extent. The amount of intelligence is 
correlated with the number, the depth, 
and the irregularity of the furrows. A 
cat's brain has a few symmetrical creases. 
In an ape the creases are deepened into 
slight furrows, and they run irregularly, 
somewhat like the lines in the palm of 
your hand. With age and experience the 



The Destiny of Man. 49 

furrows grow deeper and more sinuous, 
and new ones appear ; and in man these 
phenomena come to have great signifi- 
cance. The cerebral surface of a human 
infant is like that of an ape. In an adult 
savage, or in a European peasant, the fur- 
rowing is somewhat marked and compli- 
cated. In the brain of a great scholar, 
the furrows are very deep and crooked, 
and hundreds of creases appear which are 
not found at all in the brains of ordinary- 
men. In other words, the cerebral surface 
of such a man, the seat of conscious men- 
tal life, has become enormously enlarged 
in area ; and we must further observe that 
it goes on enlarging in some cases into ex- 
treme old age. 6 

Putting all these facts together, it be- 
comes plain that in the lowest animals, 
whose lives consist of sundry reflex ac- 
tions monotonously repeated from gener- 
ation to generation, there can be nothing, 
or next to nothing, of what we know as 
consciousness. It is only when the life 
4 



jo The Destiny of Man. 

becomes more complicated and various, so 
that reflex action can no longer determine 
all its movements and the higher nerve- 
centres begin to be evolved, that the dawn- 
ing of consciousness is reached. But with 
the growth of the higher centres the ca= 
pacities of action become so various and 
indeterminate that definite direction is 
not given to them until after birth. The 
creature begins life as an infant, with its 
partially developed cerebrum representing 
capabilities which it is left for its individual 
experience to bring forth and modify. 




VI. 




Lengthening of Infancy, and Concomitant 
Increase of Brain-Surface. 

| HE first appearance of infancy in 
the animal world thus heralded 
the new era which was to be 
crowned by the development of Man. 
With the beginnings of infancy there 
came the first dawning of a conscious life 
similar in nature to the conscious life of 
human beings, and there came, moreover, 
on the part of parents, the beginning of 
feelings and actions not purely self-regard- 
ing. But still more, the period of infancy 
was a period of plasticity. The career of 
each individual being no longer wholly pre- 
determined by the careers of its ancestors, 
it began to become teachable. Individual- 
ity of character also became possible at 
the same time, and for the same reason. 



j 2 The Destiny of Man. 

All birds and mammals which take care of 
their young are teachable, though in very 
various degrees, and all in like manner 
show individual peculiarities of disposition, 
though in most cases these are slight and 
inconspicuous. In dogs, horses, and apes 
there is marked teachableness, and there 
are also marked differences in individual 
character. 

But in the non-human animal world all 
these phenomena are but slightly devel- 
oped. They are but the dim adumbrations 
of what was by and by to bloom forth in 
the human race. They can scarcely be 
said to have served as a prophecy of the 
revolution that was to come. One genera- 
tion of dumb beasts is after all very like 
another, and from studying the careers of 
the mastodon, the hipparion, the sabre* 
toothed lion, or even the dryopithecus, an 
observer in the Miocene age could never 
have foreseen the possibility of a creature 
endowed with such a boundless capacity 
of progress as the modern Man. Never 



The Destiny of Man. 53 

theless, however dimly suggestive was this 
group of phenomena, it contained the 
germ of all that is preeminent in human- 
ity. In the direct line of our ancestry 
it only needed that the period of infancy 
should be sufficiently prolonged, in or- 
der that a creature should at length ap- 
pear, endowed with the teachableness, the 
individuality, and the capacity for prog- 
ress which are the peculiar prerogatives 
of fully-developed Man. 7 In this direct 
line the manlike apes of Africa and the 
Indian Archipelago have advanced far be- 
yond the mammalian world in general. 
Along with a cerebral surface, and an ac- 
companying intelligence, far greater than 
that of other mammals, these tailless apes 
begin life as helpless babies, and are un- 
able to walk, to feed themselves, or to 
grasp objects with precision until they 
are two or three months old. These apes 
have thus advanced a little way upon the 
peculiar road which our half-human fore- 
fathers began to travel as soon as psychi- 



54 The Destiny of Man. 

cal variations came to be of more use to 
the species than variations in bodily struc- 
ture. The gulf by which the lowest known 
man is separated from the highest known 
ape consists in the great increase of his 
cerebral surface, with the accompanying 
intelligence, and in the very long duration 
of his infancy. These two things have 
gone hand in hand. The increase of cere- 
bral surface, due to the working of natural 
selection in this direction alone, has en- 
tailed a vast increase in the amount of 
cerebral organization that must be left to 
be completed after birth, and thus has pro- 
longed the period of infancy. And con- 
versely the prolonging of the plastic pe- 
riod of infancy, entailing a vast increase 
in teachableness and versatility, has con- 
tributed to the further enlargement of the 
cerebral surface. The mutual reaction of 
these two groups of facts must have gone 
on for an enormous length of time since 
man began thus diverging from his simian 
brethren. It is not likely that less than a 



The Destiny of Man. 55 

million years have elapsed since the first 
page of this new chapter in the history of 
creation was opened : it is probable that 
the time has been much longer. In com- 
parison with such a period, the whole re- 
corded duration of human history shrinks 
into nothingness. The pyramids of Egypt 
seem like things of yesterday when we 
think of the Cave-Men of western Europe 
in the glacial period, who scratched pic- 
tures of mammoths on pieces of reindeer- 
antler with a bit of pointed flint. Yet 
during an entire geologic aeon before these 
Cave-Men appeared on the scene, " a being 
erect upon two legs," if we may quote 
from Serjeant Buzfuz, "and wearing the 
outward semblance of a man and not of a 
monster," wandered hither and thither 
over the face of the earth, setting his 
mark upon it as no other creature yet had 
done, leaving behind him innumerable 
tell-tale remnants of his fierce and squalid 
existence, yet too scantily endowed with 
wit to make any written disclosure of his 



$6 The Destiny of Man. 

thoughts and deeds. If the physiological 
annals of that long and weary time could 
now be unrolled before us, the principal 
fact which we should discern, dominating 
all other facts in interest and significance, 
would be that mutual reaction between in- 
crease of cerebral surface and lengthening 
of babyhood which I have here described. 
Thus through the simple continuance 
and interaction of processes that began far 
back in the world of warm-blooded animals, 
we get at last a creature essentially differ- 
ent from all others. Through the compli- 
cation of effects the heaping up of minute 
differences in degree has ended in bring- 
ing forth a difference in kind. In the hu- 
man organism physical variation has well- 
nigh stopped, or is confined to insignificant 
features, save in the grey surface of the 
cerebrum. The work of cerebral organi- 
zation is chiefly completed after birth, as 
we see by contrasting the smooth ape-like 
brain-surface of the new-born child with 
the deeply-furrowed and myriad-seamed 



The Destiny of Man. 57 

surface of the adult civilized brain. The 
plastic period of adolescence, lengthened 
in civilized man until it has come to cover 
more than one third of his lifetime, is thus 
the guaranty of his boundless progressive- 
ness. Inherited tendencies and aptitudes 
still form the foundations of character ; but 
individual experience has come to count as 
an enormous factor in modifying the ca- 
reer of mankind from generation to gener- 
ation. It is not too much to say that the 
difference between man and all other liv- 
ing creatures, in respect of teachableness, 
progressiveness, and individuality of char- 
acter, surpasses all other differences of 
kind that are known to exist in the uni- 
verse. 




VII. 



Change in the Direction of the Working of 
Natural Selection. 




N the fresh light which these con- 
siderations throw upon the prob- 
lem of man's origin, we can now 
see more clearly than ever how great a 
revolution was inaugurated when natural 
selection began to confine its operations 
to the surface of the cerebrum. Among 
the older incidents in the evolution of or- 
ganic life, the changes were very wonder- 
ful which out of the pectoral fin of a fish 
developed the jointed fore-limb of the 
mammal with its five-toed paw, and thence 
through much slighter variation brought 
forth the human arm with its delicate and 
crafty hand. More wondrous still were 
the phases of change through which the 
rudimentary pigment-spot of the worm, by 



The Destiny of Man. 59 

the development and differentiation of suc- 
cessive layers, gave place to the variously- 
constructed eyes of insects, mollusks, and 
vertebrates. The day for creative work 
of this sort has probably gone by, as the 
day for the evolution of annulose segments 
and vertebrate skeletons has gone by, — 
on our planet, at least. In the line of our 
own development, all work of this kind 
stopped long ago, to be replaced by differ- 
ent methods. As an optical instrument, 
the eye had well-nigh reached extreme per- 
fection in many a bird and mammal ages 
before man's beginnings ; and the essential 
features of the human hand existed already 
in the hands of Miocene apes. But differ- 
ent methods came in when human intelli- 
gence appeared upon the scene. Mr. Spen= 
cer has somewhere reminded us that the 
crowbar is but an extra lever added to the 
levers of which the arm is already com- 
posed, and the telescope but adds a new 
set of lenses to those which already exist in 
the eye. This beautiful illustration goes to 



6o The Destiny of Man. 

the kernel of the change that was wrought 
when natural selection began to confine it- 
self to the psychical modification of our an- 
cestors. In a very deep sense all human 
science is but the increment of the power 
of the eye, and all human art is the incre- 
ment of the power of the hand. 8 Vision 
and manipulation, — these, in their count- 
less indirect and transfigured forms, are 
the two cooperating factors in all intellect- 
ual progress. It is not merely that with 
the telescope we see extinct volcanoes on 
the moon, or resolve spots of nebulous 
cloud into clusters of blazing suns ; it is 
that in every scientific theory we frame by 
indirect methods visual images of things 
not present to sense. With our mind's 
eye we see atmospheric convulsions on the 
surfaces of distant worlds, watch the giant 
ichthyosaurs splashing in Jurassic oceans, 
follow the varied figures of the rhythmic 
dance of molecules as chemical element? 
unite and separate, or examine, with th$ 
aid of long-forgotten vocabularies now 



The Destiny of Man. 61 

magically restored, the manners and mor- 
als, the laws and superstitions, of peoples 
that have ceased to be. 9 And so in art the 
wonderful printing-press, and the engine 
that moves it, are the lineal descendants 
through countless stages of complication, 
of the simple levers of primitive man and 
the rude stylus wherewith he engraved 
strange hieroglyphs on the bark of trees. 
In such ways, since the human phase of 
evolution began, has the direct action of 
muscle and sense been supplemented and 
superseded by the indirect work of the in- 
quisitive and inventive mind. 




VIII. 

Growing Predominance of the Psychical Life. 
ET us note one further aspect of 




this mighty revolution. In its 
lowly beginnings the psychical 
life was merely an appendage to the life 
of the body. The avoidance of enemies, 
the securing of food, the perpetuation of 
the species, make up the whole of the 
lives of lower animals, and the rudiments 
of memory, reason, emotion, and volition 
were at first concerned solely with the 
achievement of these ends in an increase 
ingly indirect, complex, and effective way. 
Though the life of a large portion of the 
human race is still confined to the pursuit 
of these same ends, yet so vast has been 
the increase of psychical life that the 
simple character of the ends is liable to be 
lost sight of amid the variety, the indirect- 



The Destiny of Man, 63 

ness, and the complexity of the means. 
But in civilized society other ends, purely 
immaterial in their nature, have come to 
add themselves to these, and in some in- 
stances to take their place. It is long 
since we were told that Man does not live 
by bread alone. During many genera- 
tions we have seen thousands of men, ac- 
tuated by the noblest impulse of which 
humanity is capable, though misled by the 
teachings of a crude philosophy, despising 
and maltreating their bodies as clogs and 
incumbrances to the life of the indwelling 
soul. Countless martyrs we have seen 
throwing away the physical earthly life as 
so much worthless dross, and all for the 
sake of purely spiritual truths. As with 
religion, so with the scientific spirit and 
the artistic spirit, — the unquenchable 
craving to know the secrets of nature, and 
the yearning to create the beautiful in 
form and colour and sound. In the high- 
est human beings such ends as these have 
come to be uppermost in consciousness, 



64 The Destiny of Man. 

and with the progress of material civiliza- 
tion this will be more and more the case. 
If we can imagine a future time when war- 
fare and crime shall have been done away 
with forever, when disease shall have been 
for the most part curbed, and when every 
human being by moderate labour can se- 
cure ample food and shelter, we can also 
see that in such a state of things the work 
of civilization would be by no means com- 
pleted. In ministering to human happi- 
ness in countless ways, through the pur- 
suit of purely spiritual ends, in enriching 
and diversifying life to the utmost, there 
would still be almost limitless work to 
be done. I believe that such a time will 
come for weary and suffering mankind. 
Such a faith is inspiring. It sustains one 
in the work of life, when one would other- 
wise lose heart. But it is a faith that 
rests upon induction. The process of ev- 
olution is excessively slow, and its ends 
are achieved at the cost of enormous waste 
of life, but for innumerable ages its direo 






The Destiny of Man. 65 

tion has been toward the goal here pointed 
out ; and the case may be fitly summed 
up in the statement that whereas in its 
rude beginnings the psychical life was but 
an appendage to the body, in fully-devel- 
oped Humanity the body is but the ve- 
hicle for the soul. 




IX. 



The Origins of Society and of Morality. 
NE further point must be con* 




sidered before this outline sketch 
of the manner of man's origin 
can be called complete. The psychical 
development of Humanity, since its ear- 
lier stages, has been largely due to the 
reaction of individuals upon one another 
in those various relations which we char- 
acterize as social. 10 In considering the 
origin of Man, the origin of human soci- 
ety cannot be passed over. Foreshadow- 
ings of social relations occur in the animal 
world, not only in the line of our own ver- 
tebrate ancestry, but in certain orders of 
insects which stand quite remote from 
that line. Many of the higher mammals 
are gregarious, and this is especially true 
of that whole order of primates to which 



The Destiny of Man. 6j 

we belong. Rudimentary moral senti- 
ments are also clearly discernible in the 
highest members of various mammalian 
orders, and in all but the lowest members 
of our own order. But in respect of defi- 
niteness and permanence the relations be- 
tween individuals in a state of gregarious- 
ness fall far short of the relations between 
individuals in the rudest human society. 
The primordial unit of human society is 
the family, and it was by the establish- 
ment of definite and permanent family 
relationships that the step was taken 
which raised Man socially above the level 
of gregarious apehood. This great point 
was attained through that lengthening of 
the period of helpless childhood which 
accompanied the gradually increasing in- 
telligence of our half - human ancestors. 
When childhood had come to extend over 
a period of ten or a dozen years — a period 
which would be doubled, or more than 
doubled, where several children were born 
in succession to the same parents — the 



68 The Destiny of Man. 

relationships between father and mother, 
brethren and sisters, must have become 
firmly knit ; and thus the family, the unit 
of human society, gradually came into 
existence. 11 The rudimentary growth of 
moral sentiment must now have received 
a definite direction. As already observed, 
with the beginnings of infancy in the 
animal world there came the genesis in 
the parents of feelings and actions not 
purely self-regarding. Rudimentary sym- 
pathies, with rudimentary capacity for 
self-devotion, are witnessed now and then 
among higher mammals, such as the dog, 
and not uncommonly among apes. But as 
the human family, with its definite re- 
lationships, came into being, there must 
necessarily have grown up between its 
various members reciprocal necessities of 
behaviour. The conduct of the individual 
could no longer be shaped with sole ref- 
erence to his own selfish desires, but 
must be to a great extent subordinated to 
the general welfare of the family. And in 



The Destiny of Man. 69 

judging of the character of his own con- 
duct, the individual must now begin to 
refer it to some law of things outside of 
himself ; and hence the germs of con- 
science and of the idea of duty. Such 
were no doubt the crude beginnings of 
human morality. 

With this genesis of the family, the 
Creation of Man may be said, in a certain 
sense, to have been completed. The great 
extent of cerebral surface, the lengthened 
period of infancy, the consequent capacity 
for progress, the definite constitution of 
the family, and the judgment of actions 
as good or bad according to some other 
standard than that of selfish desire, ™ 
these are the attributes which essentially 
distinguish Man from other creatures. All 
these, we see, are direct or indirect results 
of the revolution which began when natu- 
ral selection came to confine itself to psy- 
chical variations, to the neglect of physi- 
cal variations. The immediate result was 
the increase of cerebrum. This prolonged 



yo The Destiny of Man. 

the infancy, thus giving rise to the capac- 
ity for progress ; and infancy, in turn, orig- 
inated the family and thus opened the way 
for the growth of sympathies and of eth- 
ical feelings. All these results have per- 
petually reacted upon one another until a 
creature different in kind from all other 
creatures has been evolved. The creature 
thus evolved long since became dominant 
over the earth in a sense in which none of 
his predecessors ever became dominant ; 
and henceforth the work of evolution, so 
far as our planet is concerned, is chiefly 
devoted to the perfecting of this last and 
most wonderful product of creative energy. 





Improvableness of Man, 
OR the creation of Man was by no 
means the creation of a perfect be- 
ing. The most essential feature of 
Man is his improvableness, and since his 
first appearance on the earth the changes 
that have gone on in him have been enor- 
mous, though they have continued to run 
along in the lines of development that 
were then marked out. The changes have 
been so great that in many respects the 
interval between the highest and the low- 
est men far surpasses quantitatively the 
interval between the lowest men and 
the highest apes. If we take into ac- 
count the creasing of the cerebral surface, 
the difference between the brain of a 
Shakespeare and that of an Australian 
savage would doubtless be fifty times 



72 The Destiny of Man. 

greater than the difference between the 
Australian's brain and that of an orang- 
outang. In mathematical capacity the 
Australian, who cannot tell the number of 
fingers on his two hands, is much nearer 
to a lion or wolf than to Sir Rowan Ham- 
ilton, who invented the method of quater- 
nions. In moral development this same 
Australian, whose language contains no 
words for justice and benevolence, is less 
remote from dogs and baboons than from 
a Howard or a Garrison. In progressive- 
ness, too, the difference between the low- 
est and the highest races of men is no less 
conspicuous. The Australian is more 
teachable than the ape, but his limit is 
nevertheless very quickly reached. All the 
distinctive attributes of Man, in short, 
have been developed to an enormous ex- 
tent through long ages of social evolution. 
This psychical development of Man is 
destined to go on in the future as it has 
gone on in the past. The creative energy 
which has been at work through the bygone 






The Destiny of Man. j} 

eternity is not going to become quiescent 
to-morrow. We have learned something of 
its methods of working, and from the care- 
ful observation of the past we can foresee 
the future in some of its most general out- 
lines. From what has already gone on dur- 
ing the historic period of man's existence, 
we can safely predict a change that will 
by and by distinguish him from all other 
creatures even more widely and more fun- 
damentally than he is distinguished to- 
day. Whenever in the course of organic 
evolution we see any function beginning 
as incidental to the performance of other 
functions, and continuing for many ages to 
increase in importance until it becomes an 
indispensable strand in the web of life, we 
may be sure that by a continuance of the 
same process its influence is destined to 
increase still more in the future. Such has 
been the case with the function of sympa- 
thy, and with the ethical feelings which 
have grown up along with sympathy and 
depend largely upon it for their vitality. 



*?4 The Destiny of Man. 

Like everything else which especially dis- 
tinguishes Man, the altruistic feelings were 
first called into existence through the first 
beginnings of infancy in the animal world. 
Their rudimentary form was that of the 
transient affection of a female bird or 
mammal for its young. First given a defi- 
nite direction through the genesis of the 
primitive human family, the development 
of altruism has formed an important part 
of the progress of civilization, but as yet it 
has scarcely kept pace with the general de- 
velopment of intelligence. There can be 
little doubt that in respect of justice and 
kindness the advance of civilized man has 
been less marked than in respect of quick- 
wittedness. Now this is because the ad- 
vancement of civilized man has been 
largely effected through fighting, through 
the continuance of that deadly struggle 
and competition which has been going on 
ever since organic life first appeared on 
the earth. It is through such fierce and 
perpetual struggle that the higher forms of 



The Destiny of Man. 75 

iife have been gradually evolved by natural 
selection. But we have already seen how 
in many respects the evolution of Man was 
the opening of an entirely new chapter in 
the history of the universe. In no respect 
was it more so than in the genesis of the 
altruistic emotions. For when natural se- 
lection, through the lengthening of child- 
hood, had secured a determinate develop- 
ment for this class of human feelings, it 
had at last originated a power which could 
thrive only through the elimination of 
strife. And the later history of mankind, 
during the past thirty centuries, has been 
characterized by the gradual eliminating 
of strife, though the process has gone on 
with the extreme slowness that marks all 
the work of evolution. It is only at the 
present day that, by surveying human his- 
tory from the widest possible outlook, and 
with the aid of the habits of thought which 
the study of evolution fosters, we are en- 
abled distinctly to observe this tendency. 
As this is the most wonderful of all the 



jrtJ The Destiny of Man. 

phases of that stupendous revolution in 
nature which was inaugurated in the Crea- 
tion of Man, it deserves especial atten- 
tion here ; and we shall find it leading us 
quite directly to our conclusion. From 
the Origin of Man, when thoroughly com- 
prehended in its general outlines, we shall 
at length be able to catch some glimpses 
of his Destiny. 




XI. 




Universal Warfare of Primeval Men. 

N speaking of the higher altruistic 
feelings as being antagonistic to 
the continuance of warfare, I did 
not mean to imply that warfare can ever 
be directly put down by our horror of cru- 
elty or our moral disapproval of strife. 
The actual process is much more indirect 
and complex than this. In respect of 
belligerency the earliest men were doubt- 
less no better than brutes. They were 
simply the most crafty and formidable 
among brutes. To get food was the prime 
necessity of life, and as long as food was 
obtainable only by hunting and fishing, 
or otherwise seizing upon edible objects 
already in existence, chronic and universal 
quarrel was inevitable. The conditions of 
the struggle for existence were not yet 



y8 The Destiny of Man. 

visibly changed from what they had been 
from the outset in the animal world. 
That struggle meant everlasting slaughter, 
and the fiercest races of fighters would be 
just the ones to survive and perpetuate 
their kind. Those most successful primi- 
tive men, from whom civilized peoples are 
descended, must have excelled in treach- 
ery and cruelty, as in quickness of wit and 
strength of will. That moral sense which 
makes it seem wicked to steal and murder 
was scarcely more developed in them than 
in tigers or wolves. But to all this there 
was one exception. The family supplied 
motives for peaceful cooperation. 12 With- 
in the family limits fidelity and forbear- 
ance had their uses, for events could not 
have been long in showing that the most 
coherent families would prevail over their 
less coherent rivals. Observation of the 
most savage races agrees with the compar- 
ative study of the institutions of civilized 
peoples, in proving that the only bond of 
political union recognized among primitive 






The Destiny of Man. jg 

men, or conceivable by them, was the 
physical fact of blood-relationship. Illus- 
trations of this are found in plenty far 
within the historic period. The very 
township, which under one name or an* 
other has formed the unit of political 
society among all civilized peoples, was 
originally the stockaded dwelling-place of 
a clan which traced its blood to a common 
ancestor. In such a condition of things 
the nearest approach ever made to peace 
was a state of armed truce ; and while the 
simple rules of morality were recognized, 
they were only regarded as binding within 
the limits of the clan. There was no rec- 
ognition of the wickedness of robbery and 
murder in general. 

This state of things, as above hinted, 
could not come to an end as long as men 
obtained food by seizing upon edible ob- 
jects already in existence. The supply of 
fish, game, or fruit being strictly limited, 
men must ordinarily fight under penalty of 
starvation. If we could put a moral inter- 



80 The Destiny of Man. 

pretation upon events which antedated 
morality as we understand it, we should 
say it was their duty to fight ; and the rev- 
erence accorded to the chieftain who mur- 
dered most successfully in behalf of his 
clansmen was well deserved. It is worthy 
of note that, in isolated parts of the earth 
where the natural supply of food is abun- 
dant, as in sundry tropical islands of the 
Pacific Ocean, men have ceased from war- 
fare and become gentle and docile without 
rising above the intellectual level of sav- 
agery. Compared with other savages, they 
are like the chimpanzee as contrasted with 
the gorilla. Such exceptional instances 
well illustrate the general truth that, so 
long as the method of obtaining food was 
the same as that employed by brute ani- 
mals, men must continue to fight like dogs 
over a bone. 



XII. 




First checked by floe Beginnings of Industrial 
Civilisation. 

UT presently man's superior intel- 
ligence came into play in such 
wise that other and better meth- 
ods of getting food were devised. When 
in intervals of peace men learned to rear 
flocks and herds, and to till the ground, 
and when they had further learned to ex- 
change with one another the products of 
their labour, a new step, of most profound 
significance, was taken. Tribes which 
had once learned how to do these things 
were not long in overcoming their neigh- 
bours, and flourishing at their expense, for 
agriculture allows a vastly greater popula- 
tion to live upon a given area, and in 
many ways it favours social compactness. 
An immense series of social changes was 
6 



82 The Destiny of Man. 

now begun. Whereas the only conceiva- 
ble bond of political combination had here- 
tofore been blood-relationship, a new basis 
was now furnished by territorial conti- 
guity and by community of occupation. 
The supply of food was no longer strictly 
limited, for it could be indefinitely in- 
creased by peaceful industry; and more- 
over, in the free exchange of the products 
of labour, it ceased to be true that one 
man's interest was opposed to another's. 
Men did not at once recognize this fact, 
and indeed it has not yet become univer- 
sally recognized, so long have men per- 
sisted in interpreting the conditions of 
industrial life in accordance with the im- 
memorial traditions of the time when the 
means of subsistence were strictly limited, 
so that one man's success meant another's 
starvation. Our robber tariffs — miscalled 
" protective " — are survivals of the bar- 
barous mode of thinking which fitted the 
ages before industrial civilization began. 
But although the pacific implications of 



The Destiny of Man. 8) 

free exchange were very slowly recog- 
nized, it is not the less true that the be- 
ginnings of agriculture and commerce 
marked the beginnings of the greatest 
social revolution in the whole career 
of mankind. Henceforth the conditions 
for the maintenance of physical life be- 
came different from what they had been 
throughout the past history of the animal 
world. It was no longer necessary for 
men to quarrel for their food like dogs 
over a bone ; for they could now obtain it 
far more effectively by applying their 
intelligence to the task of utilizing the 
forces of inanimate nature ; and the due 
execution of such a task was in no wise 
assisted by wrath and contention, but 
from the outset was rather hindered by 
such things. 

Such were the beginnings of industrial 
civilization. Out of its exigencies, con- 
tinually increasing in complexity, have 
proceeded, directly or indirectly, the arts 
and sciences which have given to modern 



84 The Destiny of Man. 

life so much of its interest and value. But 
more important still has been the work of 
industrial civilization in the ethical field. 
By furnishing a wider basis for political 
union than mere blood -relationship, it 
greatly extended the area within which 
moral obligations were recognized as bind- 
ing. At first confined to the clan, the 
idea of duty came at length to extend 
throughout a state in which many clans 
were combined and fused, and as it thus 
increased in generality and abstractness, 
the idea became immeasurably strength- 
ened and ennobled. At last, with the rise 
of empires, in which many states were 
brought together in pacific industrial re- 
lations, the recognized sphere of moral ob- 
ligation became enlarged until it compre- 
hended all mankind. 



XIII. 




Methods of Political Development, and Elimi- 
nation of Warfare. 

(]HIS rise of empires, this coales- 
cence of small groups of men into 
larger and larger political aggre- 
gates, has been the chief work of civil- 
ization, when looked at on its political 
side. 13 Like all the work of evolution, this 
process has gone on irregularly and inter- 
mittently, and its ultimate tendency has 
only gradually become apparent. This 
process of coalescence has from the outset 
been brought about by the needs of in- 
dustrial civilization, and the chief obstacle 
which it has had to encounter has been 
the universal hostility and warfare be- 
queathed from primeval times. The his- 
tory of mankind has been largely made up 
of fighting, but in the careers of the most 



86 The Destiny of Man. 

progressive races this fighting has been 
far from meaningless, like the battles of 
kites and crows. In the stream of history 
which, beginning on the shores of the 
Mediterranean Sea, has widened until in 
our day it covers both sides of the At- 
lantic and is fast extending over the re- 
motest parts of the earth, — in this main 
stream of history the warfare which has 
gone on has had a clearly discernible pur- 
pose and meaning. Broadly considered, 
this warfare has been chiefly the struggle 
of the higher industrial civilization in de- 
fending itself against the attacks of neigh- 
bours who had not advanced beyond that 
early stage of humanity in which warfare 
was chronic and normal. During the his- 
toric period, the wars of Europe have been 
either contests between the industrial and 
the predatory types of society, or contests 
incident upon the imperfect formation of 
large political aggregates. There have 
been three ways in which great political 
bodies have arisen. The earliest and low. 



The Destiny of Man. 8y 

est method was that of conquest without 
incorporation. A single powerful tribe con- 
quered and annexed its neighbours with- 
out admitting them to a share in the gov- 
ernment. It appropriated their military 
strength, robbed them of most of the 
fruits of their labour, and thus virtually 
enslaved them. Such was the origin of the 
great despotic empires of Oriental type. 
Such states degenerate rapidly in military 
strength. Their slavish populations, ac- 
customed to be starved and beaten or mas- 
sacred by the tax-gatherer, become unable 
to fight, so that great armies of them will 
flee before a handful of freemen, as in the 
case of the ancient Persians and the mod- 
ern Egyptians. To strike down the ex- 
ecutive head of such an assemblage of en- 
slaved tribes is to effect the conquest or 
the dissolution of the whole mass, and 
hence the history of Eastern peoples has 
been characterized by sudden and gigantic 
revolutions. 

The second method of forming great 



88 The Destiny of Man. 

political bodies was that of conquest with 
incorporation. The conquering tribe, while 
annexing its neighbours, gradually admit- 

\ ted them to a share in the government. 

\ln this way arose the Roman empire, the 
largest, the most stable, and in its best 
days the most pacific political aggregate 
the world had as yet seen. Throughout 
the best part of Europe, its conquests suc- 
ceeded in transforming the ancient preda- 
tory type of society into the modern in- 
dustrial type. It effectually broke up the 
primeval clan-system, with its narrow ethi- 
cal ideas, and arrived at the broad concep- 
tion of rights and duties coextensive with 
Humanity. But in the method upon which 
Rome proceeded there was an essential 
element of weakness. The simple device 
of representation, by which political power 
is equally retained in all parts of the com- 
munity while its exercise is delegated to a 
central body, was entirely unknown to the 
Romans. Partly for this reason, and partly 
because of the terrible military pressure to 



The Destiny of Man. 8g 

which the frontier was perpetually ex- 
posed, the Roman government became a 
despotism which gradually took on many 
of the vices of the Oriental type. The 
political weakness which resulted from this 
allowed Europe to be overrun by peoples 
organized in clans and tribes, and for 
some time there was a partial retrogres- 
sion toward the disorder characteristic of 
primitive ages. The retrogression was but 
partial and temporary, however ; the ex- 
posed frontier has been steadily pushed 
eastward into the heart of Asia ; the in- 
dustrial type of society is no longer men- 
aced by the predatory type ; the primeval 
clan-system has entirely disappeared as a 
social force ; and warfare, once ubiquitous 
and chronic, has become local and occa= 
sional. 

The third and highest method of form- 
ing great political bodies is that of federa- 
tion. The element of fighting was essen- 
tial in the two lower methods, but in this 
it is not essential. Here there is no con< 



go The Destiny of Man. 

quest, but a voluntary union of small po- 
litical groups into a great political group. 
Each little group preserves its local inde- 
pendence intact, while forming part of an 
indissoluble whole. Obviously this method 
of political union requires both high in- 
telligence and high ethical development. 
In early times it was impracticable. It 
was first attempted, with brilliant though 
ephemeral success, by the Greeks, but it 
failed for want of the device of representa- 
tion. In later times it was put into opera- 
tion, with permanent success, on a small 
scale by the Swiss, and on a great scale 
by our forefathers in England. The co- 
alescence of shires into the kingdom of 
England, effected as it was by means of 
a representative assembly, and accompa- 
nied by the general retention of local 
self - government, afforded a distinct pre- 
cedent for such a gigantic federal union 
as men of English race have since con- 
structed in America. The principle of 
federation was there, though not the name. 



The Destiny of Man. gr 

And here we hit upon the fundamental 
contrast between the history of England 
and that of France. The method by which 
the modern French nation has been built 
up has been the Roman method of con- 
quest with incorporation. As the ruler of 
Paris gradually overcame his vassals, one 
after another, by warfare or diplomacy, he 
annexed their counties to his royal do- 
main, and governed them by lieutenants 
sent from Paris. Self-government was thus 
crushed out in France, while it was pre- 
served in England. And just as Rome 
achieved its unprecedented dominion by 
idopting a political method more effective 
than any that had been hitherto employed, 
so England, employing for the first time 
still higher and more effective method, 
has come to play a part in the world com- 
pared with which even the part played by 
Rome seems insignificant. The test of 
the relative strength of the English and 
Roman methods came when England and 
France contended for the possession of 






92 The Destiny of Man. 

North America. The people which pre- 
served its self-government could send forth 
self-supporting colonies ; the people which 
had lost the very tradition of self-govern- 
ment could not. Hence the dominion of 
the sea, with that of all the outlying parts 
of the earth, fell into the hands of men of 
English race ; and hence the federative 
method of political union — the method 
which contains every element of perma- 
nence, and which is pacific in its very con- 
ception — is already assuming a sway 
which is unquestionably destined to be- 
come universal. 

Bearing all this in mind, we cannot fail 
to recognize the truth of the statement 
that the great wars of the historic period 
have been either contests between the in- 
dustrial and the predatory types of society 
or contests incident upon the imperfect 
formation of great political aggregates. 
Throughout the turmoil of the historic 
period — which on a superficial view seems 
such a chaos — we see certain definite 



; 



The Destiny of Man. 93 

tendencies at work ; the tendency toward 
the formation of larger and larger political 
aggregates, and toward the more perfect 
maintenance of local self-government and 
individual freedom among the parts of the 
aggregate. This two-sided process began 
with the beginnings of industrial civiliza- 
tion ; it has aided the progress of industry 
and been aided by it ; and the result has 
been to diminish the quantity of warfare, 
and to lessen the number of points at 
which it touches the ordinary course of 
civilized life. With the further continu- 
ance of this process, but one ultimate re- 
sult is possible. It must go on until war- 
fare becomes obsolete. The nineteenth 
century, which has witnessed an unpre- 
cedented development of industrial civiliza- 
tion, with its attendant arts and sciences, 
has also witnessed an unprecedented dimi- 
nution in the strength of the primeval 
spirit of militancy. It is not that we have 
got rid of great wars, but that the relative 

i proportion of human strength which has 



Q4 The Destiny of Man. 

been employed in warfare has been re- 
markably less than in any previous age. 
In our own history, of the two really great 
wars which have permeated our whole 
social existence, — the Revolutionary War 
and the War of Secession, — the first was 
fought in behalf of the pacific principle 
of equal representation ; the second was 
fought in behalf of the pacific principle 
of federalism. In each case, the victory 
helped to hasten the day when warfare 
shall become unnecessary. In the few 
great wars of Europe since the overthrow 
of Napoleon, we may see the same prin- 
ciple at work. In almost every case the 
result has been to strengthen the pacific 
tendencies of modern society Whereas 
warfare was once dominant over the face of 
the earth, and came home in all its horrid 
details to everybody's door, and threatened 
the very existence of industrial civiliza- 
tion ; it has now become narrowly confined 
in time and space, it no longer comes 
home to everybody's door, and, in so far 



The Destiny of Man. g$ 

as it is still tolerated, for want of a bet- 
ter method of settling grave international 
questions, it has become quite ancillary to 
the paramount needs of industrial civiliza- 
tion. When we can see so much as this 
lying before us on the pages of history, we 
cannot fail to see that the final extinc- 
tion of warfare is only a question of time. 
Sooner or later it must come to an end, 
and the pacific principle of federalism, 
whereby questions between states are set- 
tled, like questions between individuals, 
by due process of law, must reign supreme 
over all the earth. 





f 




XIV. 

End of the Working of Natural Selection upon 
Man. Throwing off the Brute-Inheritance. 

S regards the significance of Man's 
position in the universe, this grad- 
ual elimination of strife is a fact 
of utterly unparalleled grandeur. Words 
cannot do justice to such a fact. It means 
that the wholesale destruction of life, 
which has heretofore characterized evolu- 
tion ever since life began, and through 
which the higher forms of organic ex- 
istence have been produced, must pres- 
ently come to an end in the case of the 
chief of God's creatures. It means that 
the universal struggle for existence, hav- 
ing succeeded in bringing forth that con- 
summate product of creative energy, the 
Human Soul, has done its work and will 
presently cease. In the lower regions of 



The Destiny of Man. gy 

organic life it must go on, but as a deter- 
mining factor in the highest work of evo- 
lution it will disappear. 

The action of natural selection upon 
Man has long since been essentially di- 
minished through the operation of social 
conditions. For in all grades of civili- 
zation above the lowest, " there are so 
many kinds of superiorities which sever- 
ally enable men to survive, notwithstand- 
ing accompanying inferiorities, that natural 
selection cannot by itself rectify any par- 
ticular unfitness." In a race of inferior 
animals any maladjustment is quickly re- 
moved by natural selection, because, owing 
to the universal slaughter, the highest 
completeness of life possible to a given 
grade of organization is required for the 
mere maintenance of life. But under the 
conditions surrounding human develop- 
ment it is otherwise. 14 There is a wide 
interval between the highest and lowest 
degrees of completeness of living that 
are compatible with maintenance of life. 
7 



p8 The Destiny of Man. 

Hence the wicked flourish. Vice is but 
slowly eliminated, because mankind has so 
many other qualities, beside the bad ones, 
which enable it to subsist and achieve 
progress in spite of them, that natural 
selection — which always works through 
death — cannot come into play. The im- 
provement of civilized man goes on main- 
ly through processes of direct adaptation. 
The principle in accordance with which the 
gloved hand of the dandy becomes white 
and soft while the hand of the labouring 
man grows brown and tough is the main 
principle at work in the improvement of 
Humanity. Our intellectual faculties, our 
passions and prejudices, our tastes and 
habits, become strengthened by use and 
weakened by disuse, just as the black- 
smith's arm grows strong and the horse 
turned out to pasture becomes unfit for 
work. This law of use and disuse has 
been of immense importance throughout 
the whole evolution of organic life. With 
Man it has come to be paramount. 



The Destiny of Man. gg 

If now we contrast the civilized man in- 
tellectually and morally with the savage, 
we find that, along with his vast increase 
of cerebral surface, he has an immensely 
greater power of representing in imagina- 
tion objects and relations not present to 
the senses. This is the fundamental in- 
tellectual difference between civilized men 
and savages. 15 The power of imagina- 
tion, or ideal representation, underlies the 
whole of science and art, and it is closely 
connected with the ability to work hard 
and submit to present discomfort for the 
sake of a distant reward. It is also closely 
connected with the development of the 
sympathetic feelings. The better we can 
imagine objects and relations not pres- 
ent to sense, the more readily we can 
sympathize with other people. Half the 
cruelty in the world is the direct result of 
stupid incapacity to put one's self in the 
other man's place. So closely inter-related 
are our intellectual and moral natures that 
the development of sympathy is very con- 



wo The Destiny of Man. 

siderably determined by increasing width 
and variety of experience. From the 
simplest form of sympathy, such as the 
painful thrill felt on seeing some one in a 
dangerous position, up to the elaborate 
complication of altruistic feelings involved 
in the notion of abstract justice, the de- 
velopment is very largely a development 
of the representative faculty. The very 
same causes, therefore, deeply grounded 
in the nature of industrial civilization, 
which have developed science and art, 
have also had a distinct tendency to en- 
courage the growth of the sympathetic 
emotions. 

But, as already observed, these emotions 
are still too feebly developed, even in the 
highest races of men. We have made 
more progress in intelligence than in 
kindness. For thousands of generations, 
and until very recent times, one of the 
chief occupations of men has been to plun- 
der, bruise, and kill one another. The 
selfish and ugly passions which are pri« 



The Destiny of Man. 101 

mordial — which have the incalculable 
strength of inheritance from the time when 
animal consciousness began — have had 
but little opportunity to grow weak from 
disuse. The tender and unselfish feelings, 
which are a later product of evolution, have 
too seldom been allowed to grow strong 
from exercise. And the whims and prej- 
udices of the primeval militant barbarism 
are slow in dying out from the midst of 
peaceful industrial civilization. The coarser 
forms of cruelty are disappearing, and the 
butchery of men has greatly diminished. 
But most people apply to industrial pur- 
suits a notion of antagonism derived from 
ages of warfare, and seek in all manner of 
ways to cheat or overreach one another. 
And as in more barbarous times the hero 
was he who had slain his tens of thou- 
sands, so now the man who has made 
wealth by overreaching his neighbours 
is not uncommonly spoken of in terms 
which imply approval. Though gentle- 
men, moreover, no longer assail one an- 



jo2 The Destiny of Man. 

other with knives and clubs, they still in- 
flict wounds with cruel words and sneers. 
Though the free - thinker is no longer 
chained to a stake and burned, people still 
tell lies about him, and do their best to 
starve him by hurting his reputation. The 
virtues of forbearance and self-control are 
still in a very rudimentary state, and of 
mutual helpfulness there is far too little 
among men. 

Nevertheless in all these respects some 
improvement has been made, along with 
the diminution of warfare, and by the 
time warfare has not merely ceased from 
the earth but has come to be the dimly 
remembered phantom of a remote past, 
the development of the sympathetic side 
of human nature, will doubtless become 
prodigious. The manifestation of selfish 
and hateful feelings will be more and more 
sternly repressed by public opinion, and 
such feelings will become weakened by 
disuse, while the sympathetic feelings will 
increase in strength as the sphere for 



The Destiny of Man. 103 

their exercise is enlarged. And thus at 
length we see what human progress means. 
It means throwing off the brute-inherit- 
ance, — gradually throwing it off through 
ages of struggle that are by and by to 
make struggle needless. Man is slowly 
passing from a primitive social state in 
which he was little better than a brute, 
toward an ultimate social state in which 
his character shall have become so trans- 
formed that nothing of the brute can be de- 
tected in it. The ape and the tiger in hu- 
man nature will become extinct. Theology 
has had much to say about original sin. 
This original sin is neither more nor less 
than the brute - inheritance which every 
man carries with him, and the process of 
evolution is an advance toward true salva- 
tion. Fresh value is thus added to human 
life. The modern prophet, employing the 
methods of science, may again proclaim 
that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. 
Work ye, therefore, early and late, to pre- 
pare its coming. 




XV. 

The Message of Christianity. 

|0W what is this message of the 
modern prophet but pure Chris- 
tianity? — not the mass of theo- 
logical doctrine ingeniously piled up by 
Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Clement 
and Athanasius and Augustine, but the 
real and essential Christianity which came, 
fraught with good tidings to men, from the 
very lips of Jesus and Paul ! When did 
St. Paul's conception of the two men within 
him that warred against each other, the 
appetites of our brute nature and the God- 
given yearning for a higher life, — when 
did this grand conception ever have so 
much significance as now ? When have 
we ever before held such a clew to the 
meaning of Christ in the Sermon on the 
Mount ? " Blessed are the meek, for they 



The Destiny of Man. 105 

shall inherit the earth." In the cruel strife 
of centuries has it not often seemed as if 
the earth were to be rather the prize of the 
hardest heart and the strongest fist ? To 
many men these words of Christ have been 
as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, 
and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount 
have been openly derided as too good for 
this world. In that wonderful picture of 
modern life which is the greatest work of 
one of the great seers of our time, Victor 
Hugo gives a concrete illustration of the 
working of Christ's methods. In the saint- 
like career of Bishop Myriel, and in the 
transformation which his example works in 
the character of the hardened outlaw Jean 
Valjean, we have a most powerful com* 
mentary on the Sermon on the Mount. 
By some critics who could express their 
views freely about " Les Miserables " while 
hesitating to impugn directly the authority 
of the New Testament, Monseigneur Bien- 
venu was unsparingly ridiculed as a man of 
impossible goodness, and as a milksop and 



io6 The Destiny of Man. 

fool withal. But I think Victor Hugo un- 
derstood the capabilities of human nature, 
and its real dignity, much better than these 
scoffers. In a low stage of civilization 
Monseigneur Bienvenu would have had 
small chance of reaching middle life. 
Christ himself, we remember, was cruci- 
fied between two thieves. It is none the 
less true that when once the degree of 
civilization is such as to allow this high- 
est type of character, distinguished by its 
meekness and kindness, to take root and 
thrive, its methods are incomparable in 
their potency. The Master knew full well 
that the time was not yet ripe, — that he 
brought not peace, but a sword. But he 
preached nevertheless that gospel of great 
joy which is by and by to be realized by 
toiling Humanity, and he announced ethi- 
cal principles fit for the time that is com- 
ing. The great originality of his teaching, 
and the feature that has chiefly given it 
power in the world, lay in the distinctness 
with which he conceived a state of society 



The Destiny of Man. 107 

from which every vestige of strife, and the 
modes of behaviour adapted to ages of 
strife, shall be utterly and forever swept 
away. Through misery that has seemed 
unendurable and turmoil that has seemed 
endless, men have thought on that gracious 
life and its sublime ideal, and have taken 
comfort in the sweetly solemn message of 
peace on earth and good will to men. 

I believe that the promise with which I 
started has now been amply redeemed. I 
believe it has been fully shown that so far 
from degrading Humanity, or putting it on 
a level with the animal world in general, 
the doctrine of evolution shows us dis- 
tinctly for the first time how the creation 
and the perfecting of Man is the goal to- 
ward which Nature's work has been tend- 
ing from the first. We can now see clearly 
that our new knowledge enlarges tenfold 
the significance of human life, and makes 
it seem more than ever the chief object of 
Divine care, the consummate fruition of 
that creative energy which is manifested 
throughout the knowable universe. 



XVI. 




The Question as to a Future Life. 

PON the question whether Hu* 
manity is, after all, to cast in its 
lot with the grass that withers 
and the beasts that perish, the whole fore- 
going argument has a bearing that is by 
no means remote or far-fetched. It is not 
likely that we shall ever succeed in mak- 
ing the immortality of the soul a matter of 
scientific demonstration, for we lack the 
requisite data. It must ever remain an 
affair of religion rather than of science. 
In other words, it must remain one of that 
class of questions upon which I may not 
expect to convince my neighbour, while at 
the same time I may entertain a reasonable 
conviction of my own upon the subject. 16 
In the domain of cerebral physiology the 
question might be debated forever without 



The Destiny of Man. 109 

a result. The only thing which cerebral 
physiology tells us, when studied with the 
aid of molecular physics, is against the 
materialist, so far as it goes. It tells us 
that, during the present life, although 
thought and feeling are always manifested 
in connection with a peculiar form of mat- 
ter, yet by no possibility can thought and 
feeling be in any sense the products of 
matter. Nothing could be more grossly 
unscientific than the famous remark of 
Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought 
as the liver secretes bile. It is not even 
correct to say that thought goes on in the 
brain. What goes on in the brain is an 
amazingly complex series of molecular 
movements, with which thought and feel- 
ing are in some unknown way correlated, 
not as effects or as causes, but as con- 
comitants. So much is clear, but cerebral 
physiology says nothing about another life. 
Indeed, why should it ? The last place in 
the world to which I should go for in- 
formation about a state of things in which 



no The Destiny of Man. 

thought and feeling can exist in the ab- 
sence of a cerebrum would be cerebral 
physiology ! 

The materialistic assumption that there 
is no such state of things, and that the life 
of the soul accordingly ends with the life 
of the body, is perhaps the most colossal 
instance of baseless assumption that is 
known to the history of philosophy. No 
evidence for it can be alleged beyond the 
familiar fact that during the present life 
we know Soul only in its association with 
Body, and therefore cannot discover disem- 
bodied soul without dying ourselves. This 
fact must always prevent us from obtain- 
ing direct evidence for the belief in the 
soul's survival. But a negative presump- 
tion is not created by the absence of proof 
in cases where, in the nature of things, 
proof is inaccessible. 17 With his illegiti- 
mate hypothesis of annihilation, the mate- 
rialist transgresses the bounds of experi- 
ence quite as widely as the poet who sings 
of the New Jerusalem with its river of life 



The Destiny of Man. in 

and its streets of gold. Scientifically speak- 
ing, there is not a particle of evidence for 
either view. 

But when we desist from the futile at- 
tempt to introduce scientific demonstration 
into a region which confessedly transcends 
human experience, and when we consider 
the question upon broad grounds of moral 
probability, I have no doubt that men will 
continue in the future, as in the past, to 
cherish the faith in a life beyond the grave. 
In past times the disbelief in the soul's 
immortality has always accompanied that 
kind of philosophy which, under whatever 
name, has regarded Humanity as merely 
a local incident in an endless and aimless 
series of cosmical changes. As a general 
rule, people who have come to take such 
a view of the position of Man in the uni- 
verse have ceased to believe in a future 
life. On the other hand, he who regards 
Man as the consummate fruition of crea- 
tive energy, and the chief object of Divine 
care, is almost irresistibly driven to the be- 



112 The Destiny of Man. 

lief that the soul's career is not completed 
with the present life upon the earth. Diffi- 
culties on theory he will naturally expect 
to meet in many quarters ; but these will 
not weaken his faith, especially when he 
remembers that upon the alternative view 
the difficulties are at least as great. We 
live in a world of mystery, at all events, 
and there is not a problem in the simplest 
and most exact departments of science 
which does not speedily lead us to a tran- 
scendental problem that we can neither 
solve nor elude. A broad common-sense 
argument has often to be called in, where 
keen-edged metaphysical analysis has con- 
fessed itself baffled. 

Now we have here seen that the doc 
trine of evolution does not allow us to take 
the atheistic view of the position of Man. 
It is true that modern astronomy shows us 
giant balls of vapour condensing into fiery 
suns, cooling down into planets fit for the 
support of life, and at last growing cold 
and rigid in death, like the moon. And 



The Destiny of Man. 113 

there are indications of a time when sys- 
tems of dead planets shall fall in upon 
their central ember that was once a sun, 
and the whole lifeless mass, thus regaining 
heat, shall expand into a nebulous cloud 
like that with which we started, that the 
work of condensation and evolution may 
begin over again. These Titanic events 
must doubtless seem to our limited vision 
like an endless and aimless series of 
cosmical changes. They disclose no signs 
of purpose, or even of dramatic ten- 
dency ; 18 they seem like the weary work 
of Sisyphos. But on the face of our own 
planet, where alone we are able to survey 
the process of evolution in its higher and 
more complex details, we do find distinct 
indications of a dramatic tendency, though 
doubtless not of purpose in the limited 
human sense. The Darwinian theory, 
properly understood, replaces as much 
teleology 19 as it destroys. From the first 
dawning of life we see all things work- 
ing together toward one mighty goal, the 
8 ' 



H4 The Destiny of Man. 

f evolution of the most exalted spiritual qual- 
ities which characterize Humanity. The 
body is cast aside and returns to the dust 
of which it was made. The earth, so 
marvellously wrought to man's uses, will 
also be cast aside. The day is to come, 
no doubt, when the heavens shall vanish 
as a scroll, and the elements be melted 
with fervent heat. So small is the value 
which Nature sets upon the perishable 
forms of matter ! The question, then, is 
reduced to this : are Man's highest spirit- 
ual qualities, into the production of which 
all this creative energy has gone, to dis- 
appear with the rest ? Has all this work 
been done for nothing ? Is it all ephem- 
eral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision 
that fades ? Are we to regard the Crea- 
tor's work as like that of a child, who 
builds houses out of blocks, just for the 
pleasure of knocking them down ? For 
aught that science can tell us, it may be 
so, but I can see no good reason for be- 
lieving any such thing. On such a view 



The Destiny of Man. 115 

the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle 
without a meaning. Why, then, are we any- 
more called upon to throw away our belief 
in the permanence of the spiritual element 
in Man than we are called upon to throw 
away our belief in the constancy of Na- 
ture ? When questioned as to the ground 
of our irresistible belief that like causes 
must always be followed by like effects, 
Mr. Mill's answer was that it is the result 
of an induction coextensive with the whole 
of our experience ; Mr. Spencer's answer 
was that it is a postulate which we make 
in every act of experience ; 20 but the au- 
thors of the " Unseen Universe," slightly 
varying the form of statement, called it a 
supreme act of faith, — the expression of 
a trust in God, that He will not " put us to 
permanent intellectual confusion." Now 
the more thoroughly we comprehend that 
process of evolution by which things have 
come to be what they are, the more we are 
jikely to feel that to deny the everlasting 
persistence of the spiritual element in Man 



u 6 The Destiny of Man. 

is to rob the whole process of its meaning. 
It goes far toward putting us to perma- 
nent intellectual confusion, and I do not 
see that any one has as yet alleged, or is 
ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason 
for our accepting so dire an alternative. 

For my own part, therefore, I believe in 
the immortality of the soul, not in the 
sense in which I accept the demonstrable 
truths of science, but as a supreme act of 
faith in the reasonableness of God's work. 
Such a belief, relating to regions quite in- 
accessible to experience, cannot of course 
be clothed in terms of definite and tangible 
meaning. For the experience which alone 
can give us such terms we must await that 
solemn day which is to overtake us all. 
/The belief can be most quickly defined by 
/ its negation, as the refusal to believe that 
this world is all. The materialist holds 
that when you have described the whole 
universe of phenomena of which we can 
become cognizant under the conditions of 
the present life, then the whole story is 



The Destiny of Man. uy 

told. It seems to me, on the contrary, that 
the whole story is not thus told. I feel 
the omnipresence of mystery in such wise 
as to make it far easier for me to adopt the 
view of Euripides, that what we call death 
may be but the dawning of true knowledge 
and of true life. The greatest philosopher 
of modern times, the master and teacher 
of all who shall study the process of evolu- 
tion for many a day to come, holds that 
the conscious soul is not the product of a 
collocation of material particles, but is in 
the deepest sense a divine effluence. Ac- 
cording to Mr. Spencer, the divine energy 
which is manifested throughout the know- 
able universe is the same energy that wells \ 
up in us as consciousness. Speaking for 
myself, I can see no insuperable difficulty 
in the notion that at some period in the 
evolution of Humanity this divine spark 
may have acquired sufficient concentration 
and steadiness to survive the wreck of ma- 
terial forms and endure forever. Such a 
crowning wonder seems to me no more 



i 18 The Destiny of Man. 

than the fit climax to a creative work that 
has been ineffably beautiful and marvel- 
lous in all its myriad stages. 
/^ Only on some such view can the rea- 
/ sonableness of the universe, which still 
remains far above our finite power of com- 
\ prehension, maintain its ground. There 
"are some minds inaccessible to the class 
of considerations here alleged, and perhaps 
there always will be. But on such grounds, 
if on no other, the faith in immortality is 
likely to be shared by all who look upon 
the genesis of the highest spiritual quali- 
ties in Man as the goal of Nature's creative 
work. This view has survived the Coper- 
"nican revolution in science, and it has sur- 
vived the Darwinian revolution. Nay, if 
the foregoing exposition be sound, it is 
II Darwinism which has placed Humanity 
U upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The 
future is lighted for us with the radiant 
I colours of hope. Strife and sorrow shall 
j disappear. Peace and love shall reign su- 
preme. The dream of poets, the lesson 



The Destiny of Man ug 

of priest and prophet, the inspiration of the 
great musician, is confirmed in the light of 
modern knowledge ; and as we gird our- 
selves up for the work of life, we may look 
forward to the time when in the truest 
sense the kingdoms of this world shall be- 
come the kingdom of Christ, and he shall 
reign for ever and ever, king of kings and 
lord of lords. 







REFERENCES. 



C. P., Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 1874; U. W., The Unseen 
World, 1876; D., Darwinism and Other Essays, 1879; E. E» 
Excursions of an Evolutionist, 1884. 



I. 


C. P. ii. 432-451. 


2. 


C. P. ii. 89-91. 


3- 


C. P. ii. 318-321; D. 45. 


4. 


U. W. 40-42; D. 65-74; E. E. 278-282, 327 




336. 


5- 


C. P. ii. 154-159- 


6. 


C. P. ii. I33-I35- 


7. 


D. 45-48; E. E. 306-319. 


8. 


C. P. ii. 310. 


9- 


E. E. 109-146. 


10. 


C. P. ii. 284-323. 


11. 


C. P. ii. 342-346, 358-363- 


12. 


C. P. ii. 202-208. 


13- 


C. P. ii. 213-224. 


14. 


C. P. ii. 334. 


15- 


C. P. ii. 312-315. 


16. 


U. W. 54; E. E. 289-291. 



References. 



121 



17. U. W. 47-50; D. 75- 

18. D. 96-102. 

19. C. P. ii. 406. 

20. C. P. i. 45-71, 286; ii. 162; U. W. 6; D. 87- 

95. 




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